Forgive me, said Sima.
No, no, said Fela. I was going to say—was Chaim your first, your first love?
Sima paused.
I don’t ask for you to tell me your life before him, Simale. Israel, who knows what they do there?
Sima laughed. It’s true. The army, no one escapes intact, you understand.
Fela understood. They both giggled, uneasily. Then silence. Sima looked like she was thinking, the folds at her mouth deepening.
Yes, said Sima. He was my first love. The words came out soft, almost strangled.
Fela felt a sudden remorse for having asked. She should apologize, she thought, for having tried to dig. But she didn’t. Instead she said, I had a husband. A husband before the war.
Sima said nothing, and Fela felt a small hot circle underneath her ribs, like a match had been struck and lit in the darkness of her chest.
He was my husband, but we didn’t have a wedding. You understand? I was sixteen.
Sima nodded, her mouth slightly open.
We ran to Russia before the Germans invaded the town. We had heard. Before they came in, we were gone. My parents, they must have gone crazy with shame. But it was only I, and another sister who left to Palestine, before, who lived.
What happened? said Sima.
He died, said Fela. He was taken by the Russians into the army and he died. I heard, and I was—I was pregnant, I was pregnant and I lost the baby. A miscarriage.
The match had taken the air in her chest and gone out. It was a lie Fela was telling Sima, for the baby had been born, had lived, and had wailed before dying, but it was enough for Sima to make out the picture. The lie was easier to say than the real fact, the fact that no one on earth knew, now that her sister had died. No one on earth, not Pavel, not the children.
No one knows, said Fela. Pavel knows about him, my first husband—but not about the baby, the pregnancy. My children know nothing.
Will you tell them?
Never. Never, as long as I live. She looked suddenly at Sima. And you shouldn’t either!
Fela! cried Sima. Your secret is mine.
But Fela felt tears trailing down her white cheeks. I’m sorry, she said. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s only—I feel afraid to speak his name. I never say it.
You didn’t say it now.
Moshe Lev, said Fela. Moshe. Our town was Mlawa. Did you hear of it?
No, said Sima.
Small, said Fela. Small. Almost every person in our town died; now no one in the world says his name. No one to say his name, no one to say Kaddish. Just I do, once a year, in the night, when nobody hears. Really a man is supposed to do it, a son. What I do is close to nothing, and when I go, it will be nothing at all.
You are not going, said Sima. Where would you be going?
No, no, said Fela, impatient, shaking the tears off her face. I meant only, in the future, not now. Don’t be so serious. She took the paper napkin, refolded it so the clean part was on the outside, then moved it carefully under her eyes. There! It was better.
Sima said, Did you ever hear how—
No, said Fela. No, no. In Russia you just heard it happened. No explaining. It made it hard for me to believe it. In fact—Fela hesitated. Perhaps she was pouring out too many secrets. But this wasn’t facts, it was thoughts; it was all right to unburden. Sima wasn’t upset by it.
In fact, after I came back, after I met Pavel, in Germany, I thought I saw him, Moshe, walking down the street.
Where?
Once in the DP camp, once in another town. Here, there. There was one time I was so sure—I saw the man, he saw me, and we both kept walking. After I crossed the street I understood it couldn’t be him. But it happened many times, sometimes alone, sometimes with Pavel, once when I was walking with Larry, just a baby—each time I would see him and pass him, ignore him. Afraid. Each time I would think my heart would fly out of me. And each time I would realize it just was not him. But still, I would think—isn’t it possible? What would happen if I said hello? And the man I would look at, sometimes I would see the same thought in his mind.
Sima said, If it had been him, Feluchna, you would have stopped.
Yes, said Fela. I think so.
WAS CHAIM HER FIRST love? Sima was more than fifty years old and had never put the question to herself in that way. She had been infatuated, crazy, before him, with a colonel above her in the army, and with a native Israeli boy who played soccer in the fields near the high school she had attended one year. But first love—yes, Chaim was her first love. Even silent, spoken only in her head, the phrase pained her. First love was clean, excited, empty of fear, spilling over with self-satisfaction. None of these things remained between her and her husband any longer. Something spilled between them, but not smugness, not pride or triumph. Relief, resignation.
At one time Sima had fantasized about divorce. They had had terrible problems after her father had died, at a time when all of Lola’s schoolfriends seemed to be traveling from one parent’s home to the other during the week. She had suspected him of having an affair but never confronted him. Instead she swiveled wildly between hatred and love, finding him irritating one minute, then wishing him near her the next; she had lied to him about stupid things, the cost of Lola’s clothing or a discussion with a teacher, then felt anger at him for not divining the reality. More than a decade had passed, but a period still active in her memory—easy to go back to, revisiting each scene. Sima had gone so far as to call a lawyer, one whose number she had memorized from a late-night television commercial, but then she had not appeared for the appointment, and the lawyer’s secretary hadn’t even called to ask what had happened.
At home during the day she had paced the apartment, looking for changes to make. In the evening, ordinarily, Sima and Chaim would have read or played cards together while Lola did her homework. Sima’s desire to talk to him pulled at her after dinner was done, the dishes washed and dried. But when she articulated this wish to herself Sima would suddenly feel a rush of fury and strength rising in her. She was a small woman, light-boned, but there were evenings she could easily picture herself pulling the sink out from the bathroom wall, tearing it away from its thick steel pipes. She could imagine the water gushing from under the ceramic, flowing into the bedroom she shared with her husband, drowning the bed. She imagined Lola screaming, afraid. It’s all right, my neshumeleh, nechmada, Sima would say, it’s all right. We’re washing it clean. She imagined a call to the plumber, a pale, lanky man in a big, gray sweater, a man whose face was innocent and blank but whose body was Chaim’s. She imagined the plumber in a bent position, kneeling down at the sink to fix it.
At the new bath store on Broadway she had purchased a cheap wooden cabinet, do-it-yourself. She built a box around the pipes, screwed hinges on the miniature doors, painted it white, glued on two knobs. Lola wanted to paint the knobs red; Sima let her, and the clumps of paint, dried unevenly on the white cabinet, gave her a pained satisfaction when Chaim first saw them, so out of place among the pastel tiles. You see? she had wanted to say. You see what we have become? Her bathroom might be ridiculous, but her daughter’s room would be beautiful. She bought expensive shades, pale green shades that kept out the glare but not the light for Lola’s books.
Chaim did not say no to anything she wanted. It made her sure that he had betrayed her, as if he was agreeing with every whim out of guilt. A conversation she had overheard in the building lobby between two neighbors, one of them in the middle of a divorce, stuck with her for weeks afterward. Think of this as Jewish Christmas, she had heard the woman say to her friend, as they’d waited for the elevator, you’re not celebrating, but you might as well take advantage of the paid vacation; it won’t last long. The words had echoed in her mind, sickening her. That’s right, buy, buy, buy, she thought. Before her father became ill Sima had worked in the museum shop, become a manager. But now such a job seemed offensive, stupid, hateful, selling reproduction Greek sculpture paperweights and Impressio
nist-print scarves. Sima needed real protection. She could help people, make her life something meaningful and important. She studied for her high school equivalency and enrolled in summer classes for her bachelor’s degree in social work at Hunter.
Going to school changed things. She talked about her program with Lola, and Chaim asked her questions, which she answered politely, then with more interest. She thought about asking him to see a marriage counselor with her but instead took a course in marriage counseling, the tenets of which seemed helpful, important, but then suddenly useless. She no longer wanted to force Chaim to talk; if she was right about what she suspected, she did not want to be told. She dropped the class after two weeks, substituting a course in geriatric care at the last minute, and found to her surprise that she loved it. She took an advanced course in art therapy for the elderly; she took an internship with a group that specialized in postwar refugees. When it was done she was offered a part-time job, before she had built up even half the credits she needed to graduate.
The less dependent she became on Chaim, the more he seemed to stick to their home. She continued her classes at night, and he would cook dinner for Lola and wait for Sima in the kitchen until she came home. He would talk to her about the class or her work, or occasionally his, and then they would go to bed. They did not touch each other, and perhaps three years, maybe four, passed this way. Funny, she now did not remember what had made things thaw. Her graduation from the program? He had bought her a huge vase of white lilacs. No, it was later than that, when Lola began to go out at night in high school, and they were alone in the apartment early on a Saturday night, worrying together in front of the television.
ALL OVER THE NEWS, people were reuniting. At card games, at work, over sandwiches at the local luncheonette, everyone worried. How long could a people remain so excited about a wall? It had fallen more than a month ago. Cousins who had not seen cousins in years crossed over to greet their families in the West, to be tourists, to find jobs. The governments insisted there would be no major change, no reunification of East and West. It shouldn’t happen in our lifetimes, Vladka Budnik had once said at a dinner—and Sima remembered that all had agreed—it shouldn’t happen that Germans should be so happy in our lifetimes. Let them wait for our deaths! Then let them be happy.
At Sima’s workplace, the immigrant center, the number of Russians coming for help had grown in the last two years. Now it seemed all of Eastern Europe would start coming too. The center didn’t have so many languages, though Sima could be relied upon for those who spoke Yiddish and Polish and Russian. But how many Jews had remained in Eastern Europe? Almost all the Jews coming emigrated from the Soviet Union.
On the Monday after her coffee with Fela, Sima arrived at work to find several files on her desk. She gathered them up, went to the desk of the receptionist, a twenty-year-old college student they had hired the month before.
“Gloria is sick,” said Carmen, not looking up from her novel. “She called in and said to give her interviews to you.”
“But I have my own! My job is not to do hers,” said Sima. “It is Monday—I don’t think she really is sick.”
“That’s what she told me,” said Carmen. “Am I supposed to question her?” The phone rang, and she picked up, switched to Spanish. No, she sighed to the phone. You need the legal office. This is counseling, not immigration.
Sima peeked out from behind Carmen’s station. Already the waiting room was beginning to fill up.
By eleven, Sima was almost done with her list as well as Gloria’s. She was in need of another coffee. She looked at the list of clients. Two more, then a break; she’d be only a half hour behind.
A small man, jowled and plump, with a full head of white hair, waddled into her office.
What language is most comfortable for you? she said in Russian. Yiddish or Russian?
Russian, said the man. I prefer Russian.
But Sima heard the tight sound at the vowels; it wasn’t, she thought, his mother tongue. From another part of the Soviet Union? Elsewhere? She liked to be friendly before giving the little speech about housing and food stamps, welfare and jobs.
Where are you from?
Where do you think? said the man, abruptly. I last lived in Kiev.
No, said Sima. Before Kiev. Before Russia.
From Poland, said the man. Poland, before the war.
Poland, said Sima. I was born there too.
Yes, said the man.
But they continued speaking in Russian. Sima gave him a list of applications for elderly housing. He looked at the pages while she examined the copies of his application for refugee assistance.
When she looked up, he was staring at her, almost angry. I don’t know where any of these places are.
She returned the sharp look. We’ll give you directions to find them, after they process your applications.
He snorted.
All these people complaining! thought Sima. As if they came from a country of luxury. Gloria’s clients were always rude. Sima suspected Gloria didn’t treat them so well at the intake. But it hurt Sima to be blamed, and so she continued in a cold tone. You waited in Russia to emigrate here, when you could have left before. Why not Israel?
The man shrugged. My daughter was here. I wanted to be here.
Sima glanced again through the top pages in the file. Something struck her on one form. Place of Birth: Mlawa, Poland.
I know someone from Mlawa.
No, said the man, I doubt it.
Yes, I do, said Sima. Fela Mandl—her family name was Berlinka.
Ah! The man’s face changed. The mouth that was straight, moved up, showing gray teeth in what Sima wanted to believe was a smile. The sisters Berlinka. Of course I remember them. And now that I think of it, you know, I heard that one or two had survived. I had a friend in Israel, went to a reunion of the Mlawer, those who had left before the war, and he met one of them. We all knew them, of course. Prosperous family: a dry goods store.
It’s a coincidence, said Sima. She’s a friend of mine. Should I say hello?
Yes, said the man. Tell her hello. Hello from Baruch Sosnower. My father worked at the lumberyard.
SIMA TOOK A SPECIAL interest in the fate of Baruch Sosnower. Normally the interns did the follow-up from the office, with the clients coming in to report on their adjustment after a month, then, if they remembered, after two. But neither of the interns Sima currently supervised was particularly reliable, and Sima thought she could expend a little more effort. She sensed that Baruch had little help from his daughter, who was married with her own children, and Sima worried that it was too late for a man like him to acquire a new set of habits appropriate to New York. She drove him herself to his food stamp interviews and made special calls to several women who ran the lists at senior housing developments in Brighton Beach, in Jackson Heights, places where Baruch could get by all day speaking Russian. She exaggerated the situation to Gloria, told her the man was an emergency case. Gloria could not be relied on for everything, but she knew how to pull a string in an emergency.
She did not feel comfortable telling Fela of the discovery just yet. Pavel was back—a new man, Fela said, he had fixed his mother’s gravestone—and it seemed wrong to Sima to bring up the topic of Fela’s life before him. And Baruch was still at odd ends, unsettled, a public charge—it would diminish his dignity for Sima to talk about him while he remained in low straits, while he was still so clearly a man in need, unromantic, unburnished. She wished almost that he was someone else entirely, someone who could dissolve the older woman’s pain. It was a child’s wish, the kind of dream Lola had about her own parents’ separation. But Lola’s dream had come true. Wouldn’t it be something, if the man from Mlawa were really the Moshe of legend, if the first love were alive to remind Fela of first life? Sima began to spin a story in her head, how it would have happened. Fela, alone, not yet discovering herself pregnant, working two miles from home on the Siberian steppe, hiding flour in her shoes to bake
in secret at night, just as Sima’s father had done. Waiting for word of her lover, who had been drafted away from his home, with poor Fela watching.
When Sima was a child, her parents had been separated. Her father had been caught for dealing on the black market, sent to hard labor, an open field on the steppe. Her mother had taken over the work that her father had done, a nightwatch in the hospital. But Sima was alone, five years old in their cold hut, and Sima’s mother would steal away from the job to watch over her daughter. One night her mother was seen leaving her post. Sima had woken up early that morning, alone in the hut, no sign, no smell, no sound of her mother. She had gone outside to wait for her: nothing, no horses, no people, no one passed their isolated road. And so she had tripped a mile to the hospital steps; perhaps her mother had fallen asleep. But no one was there. It was daylight; the hospital buzzed with loud adult movement.
It had been terrifying, those hours alone. Sitting with her case files, remembering, Sima thought she could imitate to herself what Fela had experienced: the uncertainty and constant fear of being without the last loved one left in the world. But it was hard for Sima to glimpse even her own past life now. Her adult griefs were fresh; her infant ones were not. She tried to think of her memories as animals hiding inside a small hut on the steppe, a hut made of mud and stone but hung with the stiff muslin curtains her mother had found on the black market.
A miracle had happened to Sima’s mother, a miracle that no doubt saved Sima’s life. Her mother had been taken to jail and had fallen to the floor, begging the guard to release her. She had a child at home and a husband, she had lied, at the front. The little girl would starve, would freeze, would not live without her mother.
The guard had watched blankly, in what seemed to Sima’s mother a strict, controlled rage. Stop crying! he had ordered. Get up, stand up! He had pointed to a door. Go inside that room and wait, without making a sound!
Sima’s mother had scrambled up and opened the door. It was a dark room, but cold: she saw immediately that a large window was open. The words of the guard: without making a sound. Shoes off, she had crept out the window into the steppe and run home to find her daughter.
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